by Lundy, W. J.
“You’re sure about this?” Ian asked, still uncertain about taking the behemoth.
“Oh yeah. We’re going to set a new post-apocalyptic trend, I guarantee. We’ll be the Joneses, and everybody will be in a hurry to catch up. Look, it even has a cow catcher on the front and extra fuel tanks in back. There are dirt bikes over there we could hoist in the back with the crane arm for recon or exfil, if things get really desperate. This truck has fucking apocalypse written all over it.”
Ian sighed, allowing her enthusiasm to make his decision. The idea of riding the rest of the way in that truck brought a smile to his lips.
Before they did anything, though, they all needed to shower and get a few hours of deep sleep. Then, they could lay out their way ahead. The next safe house was in Shreveport, and bypassing it was not an option. El Paso was simply too far to go, and the road was a lot rougher than it used to be.
The next morning Ian had to admit that it was nice riding so high in an air-conditioned, four-door semi cab. By sticking to the rails, they only came across small groups of both infected and uninfected. It still took them three days to reach Shreveport, where they took advantage of the safe house with a full twenty-four hours off-duty. There were still some news sources out there, though most of them seemed to be independent or pirate bands. The shortwave picked up a guy in Ohio who kept screaming about this being the end of the world, as if nobody had actually noticed.
“Brilliant observation, dickhead, now shut the fuck up,” Toby said on the mic. The man did quiet, but only long enough for a man in Minnesota to claim this was God’s beautiful vindication and the beginning of new life on Earth. That caught Ian’s attention for a minute until he keyed his mic so they could hear him taking a bong hit.
“Is that what’s left in the world, a bunch of idiots?” Kinsey spat.
“It’s pretty much all we had before, so why would it be any different?” Jose replied sarcastically.
After a few hours of rest, the sat phone buzzed and Ian picked it up. “Yes, it’s us in the Shreveport safe house,” he replied to the doctor’s demands on the phone. “Yes, I still have my crew.” Ian wondered why the doctor was so concerned about the crew, unless it was his way of ensuring the satchel was still with them—the stupid satchel that Toby picked off the shoulder of a dead girl by accident.
“I would be uncomfortable telling you we could make it in less than a week, sir,” Ian said, answering his client’s question about their arrival time. “The situation out here is extreme, to say the least. If it’s urgent we could possibly meet up with a helicopter or a plane if you—Yes, sir. I will, sir.”
Ian hung up the phone, knowing that his new boss was an asshole and their contract was tenuous.
46
Beaumont Army Medical Center, El Paso, Texas
April 12th
Ram hated needles with a passion. He’d always worried about getting diabetes because his dad was diabetic. He remembered his father having to inject himself with insulin, and he knew if it came down to it and he was diabetic, he’d probably die before willfully sticking himself every day. Needles. He rather have a colonoscopy than stick himself.
Ram shook his head, what a dumb fucking thing to worry about right now. He sat up in the hospital bed. All kinds of tubes were attached to his left arm, which resembled a pin cushion.
“Fuck!” He ran a hand through his dark hair. It was already longer than he’d let it grow in years. Since the rent-a-soldiers had dropped him off at this hospital—or whatever the hell it was—he’d been constantly poked and prodded. Not an inch of him had been untouched by biohazard-suited hands. Now he knew how those poor fucks that claimed to be abducted and probed by aliens felt.
“Fuck!” Ram growled again, to no one in particular. His body was sore. Who knew what kind of shit they injected in him, trying to find a cure for this virus that was raging across the world. The door to his room opened, and a soldier in a biohazard suit stepped inside followed by a nurse, also wearing a bio suit, who carried a tray of food. Breakfast.
“Feeding time at the zoo,” Ram smirked. His right hand and left leg were cuffed to the bed with leather restraints. He’d seen this too many times on hospital overtimes. Now he was the prisoner. It sucked.
“How are you feeling today, Ram?” the nurse asked as she set the tray down on a small bedside table and rolled it across his lap.
“Like shit, Chloe,” Ram said, staring down at the food on the tray. The breakfasts were always great. Steak, eggs, potatoes, and orange juice and milk. They had to keep him healthy so they could continue to suck his blood. “How are things outside?”
“Same,” the nurse replied quietly.
“Hmmm…” Ram looked over at the big soldier, who carried an M4 across his chest. “Any word on my family? It’s been weeks.”
“Nothing yet,” the soldier said. “The doctor told me to tell you they have a squad out looking for them.”
“The doctor.” Ram picked up the dull butter knife from his tray and made a clumsy attempt to cut the steak. He was denied real cutlery after he tried to escape his first day there. “The doctor says a lot of things.” He eventually cut a piece of steak and shoved it in his mouth. Not bad. “What about my partner?”
“She’s fine,” the soldier, a sergeant by the name of Duckett, said curtly. “They have her working in another area.”
“Working?” Ram took a quick swig of the orange juice.
“She was a nurse before all this,” Chloe answered as she checked the machines monitoring his vitals.
“Oh yeah.” Ram took another drink. “She was a Navy medic.”
“Corpsman,” the sergeant corrected him.
“Can I see her?” Ram shoved a forkful of eggs into his mouth. “Please.”
“I’ll ask the doctor.”
“You do that. Ask ol’ Doc Subway.”
“Sanjay,” Sergeant Duckett corrected him again.
“Doc Sanjay,” Ram nodded. “Please.”
“I’ll run it by him,” the soldier said. “But don’t get your hopes up.”
“Right.” Ram took another drink from the orange juice. “Do I get exercise time today?”
“Yes, sir.” The sergeant glanced at his watch. Ram was allowed an hour of exercise a day. He guessed the powers that be wanted him in shape as they drained his blood. The stress of not being able to get to his family or know their fate had caused him to lose weight. Plus, he figured it wouldn’t do his family any good if he pitied himself and just wasted away. He started eating and working out during the allotted hour. If they weren’t studying him for a cure to whatever was turning people into rage-infected maniacs, Ram swore he was an inmate in some kind of black ops prison.
“Exercise time is at thirteen-hundred hours.”
“Swell.” Ram finished his breakfast and lay back in his bed. “I’m full. Give my regards to the kitchen staff.”
The nurse quickly finished checking Ram’s vitals and scooped up his tray.
“How am I, Chloe?”
“You’re doing good, Ram.” She gave him a weak smile and turned toward the door. The sergeant opened it for her, and then followed the nurse out. Ram heard the lock on the other side of the door slide into place with a loud click. The correctional officer slumped back in the hospital bed and tried to get comfortable. Bored, he grabbed the remote for the wall-mounted TV off the side table that held his plastic urinal. Every time he pissed in the damn plastic tube a nurse would come in and take it away to be analyzed. Same with his bed pan. Ram had been deemed too much of an escape risk to be escorted to the restroom every time he had to go. It was his fault. He’d tried to escape on more than one trip to the toilet. Now it was just easier to let him shit and piss in tubes and bedpans.
Flipping through the channels, he found the stations were just prerecorded programming that whoever ran this facility replayed. He dropped the remote back on the table as a rerun of Judge Judy played on the wall screen. Some dickhead had let his Rottweiler
out and it bit some other dickhead on a scooter. Ram had seen this episode at least three times this week. He knew he really was in hell right now. Glancing over to the camera that hung above the doorway, he flipped it the bird. Even though it seemed to the staff that he was finally broken and going along with their plan, Ram was still trying to figure another way to escape and find his family. He hoped that Jesse was still nearby and okay. Maybe he could somehow get to her, and they both could make their way back home.
47
Beaumont Army Medical Center, El Paso, Texas
April 12th
Unlike Ram, Jesse hadn’t tried to escape when the military contractors brought them to the medical facility. She wanted to let her captors, for lack of a better word, think she was compliant and possibly gain some of their trust. Even after Dr. Sanjay’s very invasive examination, she still kept to her charade of being just another sheep. After the first week of pointless exams and blood tests, she was deemed free of infection, but of no real medical value to Sanjay and his team. Seeing they were about to release her, and knowing it wouldn’t be good, Jesse told one of the other doctors that she’d been a nurse on a biohazard team in the Navy. This seemed to impress the doctor, a woman by the name of Wallace, who then passed the information on to Dr. Sanjay. A nerve-wracking hour later, Wallace returned to the small room where they kept Jesse and made her an offer.
The correctional officer just nodded as the blonde-haired doctor told her she could stay at the facility and work in the lower levels with the infected patients. Any problems, Wallace nodded at the two soldiers in MOPP gear that stood on either side of the door, holding M4 rifles, and she would be dealt with. The doctor didn’t explain how; she didn’t need to. Jesse smiled to herself, hoping that her plan to find Ram and escape this shithole would work.
It had been at least three weeks since soldiers on the bridge had captured them. They were lucky enough to remain together when Sanjay’s people vacated the CDC in Atlanta and moved to a secured facility in El Paso. It was almost as if they’d forgotten that they’d come in together, and she was simply another team member.
Jesse had been put to work helping take blood samples from the restrained infected. It was a horrible and physically demanding job. Several of the doctors, nurses, and soldiers had been attacked while trying to draw blood from the infected. They were starting to lose people every day to the virus—or parasite, or whatever the hell it was. More soldiers would come in and put down the newly infected. As the world collapsed around them, so did the medical staffing. Soon, Jesse found herself promoted to the other areas of the facility. Her plan, although not quite what she had imagined, was working. Jesse only hoped Ram was still alive.
“Moreno,” a physician’s assistant named Dawkins stopped at her table in the almost vacant staff cafeteria. Jesse glanced up at the frazzled man from her plastic tray of microwave lasagna. Without uttering a word she took a small forkful of her lunch and offered it to him. Dawkins waved her off. “No thanks.” The PA had been attracted to the dark-haired Jesse and she felt she could use that in her favor. Right now, it looked like Dawkins had other urgent things on his mind.
“Your loss,” she said, chewing on the tasteless processed lasagna.
“I just came down to tell you that you’ve been assigned to Alpha Wing.”
“Alpha Wing?” Jesse set her fork down. A-Wing was where they kept Ram. She’d found that out by carefully asking the right staff members.
“Yeah. We lost a couple of staff this morning.” Dawkins ran a hand through his mop of uncombed hair. “Redenour wants you there, STAT.”
“What about Dr. Wallace she—”
“Wallace was one of those we lost.” He stared down at her tray of cold lasagna. “STAT.”
“Okay.” Jesse grinned internally. “Tell Doc Redenour I’ll be right there.” She quickly finished the lasagna, not really tasting it, but knowing it was always good to eat when you could. The way things were going, who knew when the food would run out.
48
Austin High School, El Paso, Texas
April 14th
“He’s definitely been bitten, Sergeant,” the medic said to Sergeant Wilson.
“I can see that. Shit.”
The FEMA camp at Austin High School had an outbreak earlier that day, in the morning. The infected descended on people while they were sleeping, killing hundreds, and the ensuing panic injured hundreds more.
They called in soldiers from Fort Bliss to put down the outbreak; they’d been going through the surrounding neighborhoods, looking for survivors and infected. The process was complicated by those survivors hiding until they succumbed to their wounds and then went mad themselves.
While searching a tool shed, a child hiding under a table saw bit one of Sergeant Wilson’s civvies on the calf. The civilian, a CPA from Albuquerque named Ramsey, was about to run out of time. The medic patched the wound, but the infection would take him soon.
“He has to go to Beaumont,” the medic said. “All bite survivors go there. They’re equipped to deal with it.”
Sarah’s ears perked up. “I’ll escort him up there,” she said.
Wilson looked at her for a minute. “All right. You go, get him checked in, or whatever, and hitch a ride back with one of the medics. Don’t stay out here any longer than you have to.”
“Roger.”
She climbed into the ambulance with the injured man. The EMT looked at her rifle and returned to checking Ramsey’s vital signs.
“Ramsey, how you doing?” she asked.
“The fuck you think I’m doing? I’m a dead man walking. You should just put a bullet in me now.”
“You know I can’t do that.”
“Why not? Because he’s here?” Ramsey asked, pointing angrily at Sergeant Wilson. “He knows I’m a goner. Twelve hours, maybe less, no one will have an issue popping me. Should just get it over now.”
“No one is shooting anyone in my bus,” the EMT interjected. “Besides, they’re working on this at Beaumont. I hear they can slow the progression, that they’re close to a cure.”
“Hear that, Ramsey? Don’t be so quick to give up,” Sarah said.
Ramsey laid his head back on the gurney. “Fuck me.”
The trip took less than ten minutes. They rolled the gurney out of the ambulance, dropped the legs, and wheeled Ramsey inside, where a man in a white coat, but with Army ACUs underneath, met him and spoke with the EMT. “East wing, containment unit!” the man shouted, and orderlies in scrubs whisked Ramsey away. Sarah knew she’d never see him again.
She walked over to the front desk and approached a soldier who was busy typing. “Hi,” she said. “Is Leonard Naranjo here? I have a message I’m supposed to give him.”
“He’s on break,” the woman replied, her eyes narrowing in a suspicious glare. “What is it? I can pass it on to him.”
Sarah scrambled for a response, falling back on movie jargon. “It’s eyes-only. I give it to him directly or not at all.”
The woman studied Sarah for a moment and then picked up the phone, speaking quickly and quietly. She made eye contact with Sarah again and asked, “Who are you?”
Sarah almost said “Washburn” but didn’t want to chance the woman making the connection to Jack. “Tell him Charlie sent me.”
“Charlie sent her,” she said into the phone. “Okay.” She hung up, looked up at Sarah again, and passed a clipboard to her. “He’ll be down in a minute. Sign in please.”
Sarah wrote Melanie Gibson on the paper and signed illegibly. “Thank you,” she said, passing the clipboard back.
“Mmm hmm.” The woman had resumed typing, ignoring Sarah.
A few minutes passed before the elevator dinged and Leonard came out. His face lit up when he saw Sarah. “Hey, Sarah!” he exclaimed. “I’ve been out to see you a couple of times, but you guys are never there.”
Sarah rushed over to him. “I know. They’re walling off Fort Bliss with cargo containers, but you’ve probab
ly seen that. We’re working on that day and night—unless they deploy us out to the city to fight an outbreak, like today.”
“Wow,” Leonard whistled. “What’s up with Charlie? Is he okay? Sergeant Shultz said you have a message for me from him?”
“Not here,” she answered. She grabbed Leonard by the arm and pulled him away from the front desk. “Can you get me in to see Jack?”
His face grew serious. “I don’t think so. They brought another guy in. Big guy, older, named Ram or something like that. He’s tried to escape a couple of times, so they’ve upped security in Alpha Wing. One of the nurses was complaining they won’t even let him go to the bathroom, so he’s shitting in a bedpan.”
“Gross. Is there a way up there, though? I mean, we can try, can’t we? I don’t know when the next time I’ll be able to get up here will be. Things are starting to get bad in the city.”
Leonard sighed. “I know, it sucks. A bunch of people are talking about leaving. I’ve been calling my dad, passing on info to him whenever I can get through. He wants me to come home.”
“I can’t blame you if you leave, Leonard. You came here to get information, and you’ve done that. You should leave when you get the chance.”
“Not without you and Charlie.”
“No, Leonard. When you have a chance to leave, you go. Don’t worry about us.”
“Okay,” he agreed. Changing the subject, he asked, “If I send you up to Alpha, do you have a plan?”